Deceptive Food Labeling

Do you believe that these labels are regulated by the FDA? The food labels listed above can mean just about anything. They are marketing words and have no nutritional meaning whatsoever.

Everyone knows about MSG and if you don’t then you are currently educating yourself on how much is hidden in processed foods. One of the ingredients out there is autolyzed yeast extract which is documented to always contain MSG. Guess what? That’s right, autolyzed yeast extract is used for only one purpose in manufactured foods: as a chemical taste enhancer.

Claiming MSG is natural because free glutamic acid appears in tomatoes is the same as saying cocaine is natural because it’s derived from ingredients found in the coca leaf. Of course, it’s all a matter of potency — you can take a natural plant like coca and drink coca leaf all day long in Peru without any of the dangerous or addictive effects of cocaine.

Coca leaf tea is not a hard drug it’s a plant. When the active constituents of the coca tea are removed and refined into a highly concentrated format, this becomes cocaine. That’s when it becomes a drug or chemical.

The same thing is true with MSG. If you’re eating seaweed, that’s not a problem for your health; in fact, seaweed is very good for you and it’s now shown to actually prevent and even help treat cancer. When MSG is taken out of seaweed or you synthesize MSG and put it into a highly concentrated form, then it functions as a neurotoxin — that’s why it’s called an excitotoxin (an ingredient known to cause nerve damage by overexciting nerves). MSG enhances the taste of foods: by overexciting the taste buds on the tongue. While MSG is sometimes listed directly on the label, it is more frequently hidden in other ingredients.

Many companies will have claims that MSG is natural but, in fact, it uses highly potent refined extracts that don’t occur anywhere near that concentration in nature.

Similarly, whole grain corn is a healthful, nutritious food. However, refined corn and extracting the sugars to make high-fructose corn syrup, it becomes a blatantly unnatural ingredient that contributes to obesity and type-II diabetes. Yet the corn associations insist that high-fructose corn syrup is “all natural” because it comes from a plant.

The point is that a food manufacturer can take anything that occurs somewhere in nature and refines it to increase the potency by a factor of 1000 times or more, and then claim that their product is “all natural.” In other words, if cocaine were legal, they could put crack cocaine in their veggie burgers and call that all natural too. In fact, they can scrounge up just about anything found on the planet, whether it’s heavy metals like mercury or arsenic or refined sugars made from beets or corn, and they can put those in their foods and call it “all natural”.

The key is the process is unnatural, not the source. When you chemically or structurally alter food ingredients into a form that no longer appears anywhere in nature, it’s no longer natural. Regardless of what the food manufacturers claim.

Take the time to read the ingredients, not just the calories. You may find that your health will take a turn with this small change in your behavior.